Google has built a fleet of cars that drive themselves, and over the past several months, these robotic vehicles have driven over 140,000 miles on public roads, from the Pacific Coast Highway to the famous twists and turns of San Francisco’s Lombard Street.

As the company revealed on Saturday morning with a blog post, each car is equipped with video cameras, radar sensors, and a laser range finder that alerts the vehicle to other traffic, and they navigate using maps previously collected by cars that were driven by good old fashioned human beings.

The self-driving cars, Google says, are never unmanned. A human sits in the driver seat and can take control of the car at anytime, and according to a New York Times story that coincided with Google’s blog post, the California Department of Motor Vehicles has deemed the cars legal because a human can override the automated controls.

But once these robo-cars have racked up a few million untroubled miles, there’ll be less need for a human to second guess them, won’t there? Although, once such systems really start to rock and roll, the new kinds of accidents made possible will be a great inspiration to SF writers.

Applying computers to word processing, picture processing etc. is easy, and has been done. Applying computers to transport is hard and is taking longer, especially when so much of the infrastructure is publicly owned, which makes risky experimentation either too hard or two easy, both being very bad. So, the benefits of applying computers to trains and cars and airplanes, etc., will take longer to materialise. I’ve always felt that computer controlled vehicles are the future of transport, like the Docklands Light Railway trains (which are centrally controlled and unmanned), or like these Google cars (which are controlled by the car’s computer but by a computer which can communicate much more effectively with the network as a whole).

One obvious pay-off of cars that communicate more intimately with each other is that entire traffic jams might be able to move along in a big clump, like trains, coupled together only by computer intelligence. Also, computer control can include into its regular calculations piles of info about the state of traffic elsewhere in the system, and do far more accurate sums about what is, right now, the best or the cheapest way to get from here to there.

Best way to speed up all this? Road use pricing, preferably on privately owned roads. That way experimentation with neither be too hard nor too easy, see above.